by Gail Hareven
From the moment I had landed, my sense of distance had gone haywire, and at that moment it seemed to me that I could have put out a finger and touched the cracks in the ice, or the white marble of the parliament building on the other side of the river and the six-lane road. Something opened inside me, something opened and spread and adapted itself to the vast dimensions of the place. Alek lay on the bed behind me and smoked. I was electrified, I had wings, I was too awake even to lie down beside him. The height stimulated me. And ghosts of previous guests in the Stalinist tower, people who were once alive and were now dead. The privileged of the regime. The dead man on holiday who hung his suit up in the closet, the dead man who sat writing opposite the mirror, the dead man who, like me, dried his wet stockings in the bathroom—who were they? What nightmares did they have here on this bed? What nightmare did they imagine in detail when they were awake?
I thought: If somebody pushed me out of the window now I wouldn’t fall. Weightless, I would glide over the city like a bird.
There is a pose that may well only exist in old movies: a man and a woman exchange important declarations while standing not face to face, but face to elegant back. If I’m not mistaken, a lot of the dialogue in Casablanca takes place this way, and I apparently had a romantic echo of that kind in my head when I asked Alek: “October ’72 … I didn’t ask you then, but why did you propose marriage to me?” I imprisoned the cold air inside me until he answered me, and when he answered I could hear the smile in his voice. “Maybe I wanted to see how far you would go with it.” It was clear that he wasn’t talking about my politics. “Did you have any doubts?” I asked.
“Yes, I think I did.”
“It’s no big deal.”
“What do you mean?”
“That it all seems very small to me.”
“It all seems small to you … if you say so. I remember things differently.”
“What do you remember?” Alek sighed and didn’t reply. “What? Tell me,” I turned around to face him. “What do you remember?”
“I think it was hard for you.”
“So what if it was hard? Maybe it wasn’t hard for me at all. Maybe that was exactly how I wanted it.”
“Really?” He examined me with narrowed eyes.
“Yes, really. Why are you laughing?” I asked, laughter in my voice too, and I sat down on the windowsill with my profile to him.
“You’re beautiful.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“Actually I do believe. That’s beautiful too.”
“What? What? What’s beautiful?” The click of a lighter, and no answer. I put my hand on the window pane, tilted my head slightly, and with three fingers blocked the river. “You’re wrong. It was never hard for me, not really,” I said and examined the new window picture, “and on Wednesday too, when we say goodbye and I get on the plane, it won’t be hard for me.”
“If it isn’t hard for you, good. I’m glad.”
I freed the river and hid the road. “Have you noticed that someone could shoot straight into the President’s residence from here?”
“There’s already been a shooting here. But in the opposite direction. During the August putsch a photographer was shot in the window here. What are you doing there?”
“Looking at things,” I answered like an intoxicated child. “You know what I think? I think I have a lot of strength. You know how much strength I have?”
“Enough to stop a bolting horse and enter a burning house.”
“You’re making fun again.”
“I’m not making fun. Nekrasov wrote it. He wrote it seriously.”
“Try me.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“You want me to try your strength? That’s what you want?”
“Yes.”
The next movement looked like a response to my “Yes,” it was impossible to think anything else. It was close to three o’clock in the morning, and Alek got up and got dressed, and as he put the key to the room in his pocket he said, “I’ll be back. Don’t let anyone in.”
HOW FAR ARE YOU GOING WITH IT
The Moscow Alek was the same person, but nevertheless different. When he met me at the airport, at first glance he looked tired, and only afterwards, in the taxi, I realized that the eyelids which were beginning to droop a little gave him a new look of weariness or sad resignation, but that this deceptive expression was contradicted again and again by a lively smile, because Alek, at least during my visit, was as intoxicatingly alert as I was. Not only did he play the gentleman more attentively than ever—I already knew exactly what these gestures were worth—but from the moment he picked me up at the airport he made it clear in many little ways that, more than acting as my tour guide, he intended to be my bodyguard here. In the street he was careful to take my arm so that I wouldn’t slip on the ice. He tied the strings of my fur hat under my chin, carried my handbag, chose for both of us the moment to leap into traffic and cross the road. In addition to all this, he insisted, to my surprise, that I accompany him to all his meetings at the Journalists’ House, and to apartments steeped in the smell of smoke and wet old clothes, all of them either too cold or overheated. “I’m an egoist,” he said one night as we descended stairs stinking of cooking and urine in the dark, “maybe I shouldn’t have told you to come.”
“Why?”
“Nobody knows what could happen here.”
“I like not knowing,” I said.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“You’re like a little girl,” he said and pressed me against the wall, laughing and strangely excited. And when he removed his lips from my neck he lifted his head, looked up as if he was searching for something, and added: “This smell, I didn’t think I could get used to it again. We had a whole life in stairwells like these.”
“So what did they say could happen here?” I asked as he led me downstairs. He translated very little for my benefit during the interviews. “What could happen?” He replied: “History could repeat itself, or not repeat itself, and both possibilities are frightening. Moscow is paradise compared to what’s happening in other places. Already people have no gas, no food, no salaries, no pensions, no nothing.”
I was completely dependent on him, dependent on him physically as I had never been anywhere else. I needed him in order to ask for another cup of lousy coffee at the hotel, in order to open the window I was unable to budge, to cross the street safely, even to understand the dialing instructions and call Hagar in Israel and go on lying to her—when he summoned me to him, I lied to Hagar and told her that I had been invited to Moscow to lecture on behalf of the Jewish Agency, and I stuck to this story on my subsequent visits too. I have to admit that I enjoyed the helplessness, the total dependence on Alek, and for some perverse reason I even enjoyed the fear. In February of 1993 normal people didn’t go to Moscow as tourists, and it didn’t even occur to Alek to take me to any of the tourist sites. Under the splendour of the snow there were filthy tenements and palaces, patched with dark squares of boarded-up windows. Passive lines of people stood in the clouds of steam at the entrances to the Metro; bookshelves, clothes hangers, shoe closets, kitchen cabinets, glass-fronted sideboards were emptied for sale. In all of Alek’s meetings the warnings were repeated: don’t go there, don’t let her go, don’t do this, that, or the other thing. Despite his Russian and his connections, they lumped us together as naive foreigners who needed to have the dangers pointed out to them.
At night I had the recurrent fantasy that the airport was closed, that the television screen was blacked out, that the silence meant the telephones were disconnected and tanks were blocking the roads. Alek: “The screen won’t go black. You’ll know that it’s happening when the television starts giving us Swan Lake.”
What would I do if he was torn away from me? If he went out to get something or clear something up and didn’t come back, if he was thrown bleeding onto a street corner, if he lay with his
body broken in a hospital or a jail, if he was sent to the infinite expanses of the East? I doubted I would survive. Or perhaps I would survive but I would never return to the world. I would be tossed by the tidal wave of history into some other mutation. I would wander the Metro platforms, a demented beggar, mumbling my pleas in broken Russian.
Alek didn’t leave me alone for a minute, until “You want me to try your strength?” when he got up and went out.
I think about the dramatic “Try me” that came out of my mouth and I fill with self-loathing. What feeling was I dramatizing there? And what response was I longing for? For him to say to me, “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee”? For him to test my love with some sadistic trick? To make me wait and wait for his return, until I sang over the domes of Moscow, “If crying is forbidden I will not cry”? Now it occurs to me that I identified cruelty with testing, and confused being tested with being chosen. He would choose me in order to try me. He would try me and then I would be the chosen one. Look at me, winged and electrified, I can do anything. I’m stupid Noa Weber, a chosen people of one woman.
Alek came back after fifteen minutes. “Aren’t you cold yet?” and he carried me to bed and lay me down and stroked me until my whole body arched, but he didn’t get undressed. Twenty more minutes passed, maybe half an hour, until there was a knock at the door.
The night before, it happened that we talked about the prostitutes. They hung around in the lobby at all hours of the day and night, standing on stiletto heels next to the telephones, or sitting on leather armchairs under the fresco of a sturdy peasant woman, gigantic as a goddesses, carrying sheaves of wheat. And I in my stupidity didn’t realize that the women in brief mini skirts and fur coats were whores. How could I have known? I didn’t know the first thing about prostitutes, except the ones in the movies, and in any case the way that some of the Russian women we met were dressed and made up seemed whorish to me. Amused by my lack of perception, Alek said that next time one of them called our room to find out if it was occupied by a single man, perhaps he should invite her to come on up, so that I could satisfy my curiosity without staring in the lift, like I did. “You can use it in your book,” said the man who had never read even one of my books.
When he got up to answer the knock at the door it occurred to me that when he went out he had invited one of the whores in the lobby to come up to our room. In order to test me—how? Doing—what? Interviewing her? Making love to her before his eyes for his enjoyment? Watching him fuck her? Watching her give him a blow job? From the moment he got up until he closed the door maybe sixty seconds passed, but during those sixty seconds I imagined with utter clarity all three latter possibilities, and in my imagination I did not rebel or protest against any of them.
Even in my glittering mood, even in my self-intoxicated, hallucinatory state, I knew that it was only a fantasy, and that nothing was going to happen. Whose fantasy? Not mine and not Alek’s, but a kind of morbid symptom of an implanted virus, the pornographic mental product of a pornographic industry. The product of the male sex industry. While I only added the words “a pornographic mental product of the sex industry” later on, I definitely remember that in real time, too, in some corner of my mind, I thought to myself: “This is an alien fantasy.”
But in real time this self-criticism was not in the least effective, and the fact is that in the following seconds I froze like a rabbit in the bed, riveted by the horror of the loathsome trial about to come through the door. And even when I heard it was a man’s voice, my thoughts went on turning round and round in the same area: I’m naked and Alek’s dressed, I asked to be tested and now the test is at the door, waiting to come into the room. And I’m not getting dressed or doing anything to stop it.
HOW DID I GET HERE
But how did I get here, and what am I doing in the Ukraine Hotel? I was about to report on my wedding day, that is what I intended on doing, but now that I’m already in Moscow, I may as well stay there a moment longer, until the end of this particular story.
Alek closed the door and came back inside with a bottle of vodka in his hand. He put it down between the double windows, to cool it, and then he got undressed and climbed into bed. Aroused as I was, I couldn’t fly again. Carefully I touched the little wrinkles around his eyes, I covered his heavy eyelids with my hand, it was the first time in our history that I left my body to lie with him, and distanced my soul for fear that he would read my thoughts.
Another few lines on this subject, before I return to the matter of our marriage. I said that the test of the prostitute was only the mental product of the pornography industry, which is of course an easy and convenient solution. Too easy and convenient. Because what am I saying by it? I’m saying that it wasn’t me hallucinating, it wasn’t me fantasizing, but some wicked corrupt people who came and put these fantasies in my head.
Sexual fantasies, I think, are a rather banal subject, because when you come right down to it, how many of them are there? We are all fed by the same junk, and however many junk fantasies there are, there’s no problem cataloguing them. They’re catalogued in the video libraries. They’re catalogued on the sex sites on the Internet. They’re catalogued in the tabloids and in the brothels.
I don’t use pornography, I have never been tempted to enter one of those sites, and nevertheless it’s clear to me that I’m polluted too—it simply can’t be otherwise. The pictures, the images, and the symbolic gestures are everywhere.
I have no idea how people thought about sex before cinema and television. It’s clear that most people didn’t read the Marquis de Sade or Moll Flanders or anything of the kind, so that if pre-cinema man had fantasies about sex they were evidently his own personal fantasies, taken from his private memories and personal experience, and not some polluting germ male industrialists shoved into his brain.
Today nobody has a chance of developing a virgin fantasy any more. Even if they’ve never opened a Penthouse or watched Nine 1/2 Weeks, however hard people try to protect themselves they get infected by perversion anyway, because the system insinuates it even via the most ostensibly innocent places. Including family favorites. Take for example the women in the movies of the forties and fifties, the way they hit the man on his chest or back, hitting and hitting hysterically, until their hands gradually come to rest and the blows turn to caresses. Look at Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett O’Hara upstairs to the rape she’s asking for, listen to her singing happily afterwards, and tell me what to call it if not pornography. Look at the way Howard Keel spanks the shrewish Kathryn Grayson in Kiss Me Kate; remember how Clark Gable tames Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night; remember how the spineless Adele H. sends a whore to her officer to make him happy, and how that revolting pervert in Breaking the Waves sends his wife to fuck.…
And that’s quite enough, there’s no need to look-remember-and-see, not now, because without in any way belittling the importance of the foregoing lecture, I didn’t undertake to lecture here on sexuality and the cinema, on the cinema and patriarchy, on patriarchy and capitalism. Because this isn’t a public debate, and that’s not why I sat down to write.
The crux of my problem is that it’s clear to me that this whole lecture is one big excuse. Because even if the masochistic virus was implanted in my mind, it’s still my mind, mine and nobody else’s, made up of a combination of transplants just like anybody else’s. So that even if I babble on here for hours about the influence of the media, it will not negate the knowledge of the polluted self or blur the sickening awareness that of the entire catalogue of fantasies, my sick mind chose to replay the one I regard as the most humiliating of all: a man amusing himself, a woman victim, and a whore.
WE MARRIED IN OCTOBER
In October I married Alek, and there was no way I could avoid telling my parents. My mother, to be precise, because that week my father was out of the country again. In childish embarrassment I put it off until almost
the last moment, two days before the wedding, so that in the end I did it in the worst possible way. Years later, and for quite a long time, I regretted my rudeness towards her, but it didn’t happen at once, far from it.
Supper at the Webers’. Batya Weber, my mother, cuts up a cucumber, a tomato and a hard-boiled egg on her plate, smears a slice of bread with low-fat white cheese, and arranges everything in bite-sized pieces before she begins to chew. My sister Talush studies the shape of the egg as she rolls it around and around her plate. The transistor radio is on in anticipation of the seven o’clock news.
“I have news,” and in the same breath, “the day after tomorrow I’m getting married.” An atavistic maternal glow spreads over my mother’s face before she takes in the words “the day after tomorrow.” Mazal tov, Batya, mazal tov, Benjy, what’s this we hear? Your daughter’s getting married? A little young, isn’t she? So, where’s it going to be? On the kibbutz? In a reception hall? Tell us everything. And who’s the groom?
On the stock exchange of Usha Street it was a story worth its weight in gold, not just another anecdote, but a full blown production, and in days to come I capitalized on it shamelessly, blunting the embarrassment and guilt with a mockery that improved with practice. Think of this woman, that is to say my mother, Batya, with her socialist upbringing in the children’s house on the kibbutz. Her parents turned their backs on their bourgeois families, Grandpa left the shtetl, Grandma ran away from the family home in Kraków, they cleared away rocks, sweated in the fields, burned with malarial fevers, and all for what? For the revolution, right? To create a new man for us here who would live in a new, just society. There was an article about it in the paper only last week, I don’t know if you saw it. A new man, a new family, a new form of relationship—that’s what they wanted and that’s what they talked about. And what did we get instead? Fiddler on the Roof, back to the shtetl with violins, mazal tov, comrades, mazal tov, our little girl’s getting married and grandchildren come next.